Site News  |   Monitor Keywords  |   Monitor Archive  |   Organizer  |   Account Info  |

Application server provisioning system and method based on disk image profile

The present invention generally relates to an application server provisioning system and method, and particularly, to a system and method for managing and distributing application server disk images and image profiles, and provisioning an application server using the disk images based on the image profiles.

In recent years, the demands that customers require service-oriented IT business to provide application server provisioning have increased dramatically. The so-called application server provisioning refers to an operation of installing and configuring various software on an application server. A conventional application server provisioning method is that an engineer brings all software installation CDs to customer's sites, and installs and configures an operating system and various application software components on the application server one by one as customers required. The problem of this conventional provisioning method lies in that the engineer providing the application server provisioning service must take a long time and effort to do this work, which is very painful for the engineer who does this laborious work day after day. Furthermore, the conventional provisioning method is complicated and time-consuming, thereby increasing the probability of the occurrence of human errors. Additionally, since the applications have to be updated to their new versions continuously, the engineer always needs to know how to make the installed applications work well together without the occurrence of collision, performance decrease or the like. Moreover, since there lacks a fast and simple provisioning method to fit a customer's dynamic architecture design, the provisioning experience of unique installation and configuration that the customer or the engineer performs on an application sever can not be reused for other application servers that have completely the same installation and configuration requirements.

A well-known used method for solving this problem is to apply prepared disk image to the application server and provision the application server by restoring a disk. IBM RDM (Remote Deployment Manager) is one of such kind of provisioning tools. GHOST is another well-known disk image creating and restoring tool.

However, customers' requirements are dynamic, and different customers require different application servers with different pre-installed application. In order to satisfy the dynamic customers, a provisioning service provider has to prepare and maintain a large number of disk images for the provisioning of various application servers, and thus storing those disk images will consume a huge amount of storage. For example, taking simple data center scenario as an example, suppose that there are 4 different server machine types (IBM BladeServer HS20, X460, X100 and BladeCenter H Chassis), 3 different types of operating systems (Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Linux), a database application with 2 versions(DB2 v8.0 and DB2 v7), and WebSphere applications with two versions (WAS 6 and WAS 5), and both DB2 and WAS may be installed on a same server, or only one of them may be installed. Therefore, to satisfy different customer requirement, there should be 4×3×(2+2+2×2)=96 different application server installation options. As is known to all, the typical server disk size is usually very large, and the size of the disk image is at least the same as the size of data actually saved on the disk, i.e. the size of the disk with empty parts removed. Therefore, the disk image for the typical server disk is also usually very large, for example, 20 G. Thus, if one disk image is created for each of the 96 different installation options, these disk images need to consume a storage space of up to 96×20=1920 G=1.92 T in total. Note, this is just a very simple example, and the real scenarios are often much more complicated, thereby resulting in an unimaginable storage capacity requirement and making that disk image-based application server provisioning is impossible to apply. Another major problem is to distribute and manage such a huge number of disk images worldwide. Current international IT companies have to provide provisioning service at different sites. But to get all disk images stored locally to the customer and keep the updating of the disk images requires much management effort.

The invention proposes a system and method for managing and distributing application server disk images and image profiles, and provisioning an application server using the disk images based on the image profiles. With the system and method, a large number of disk images may be stored in a typical enterprise storage system; the disk images may be distributed worldwide; and fast and easy provisioning processes may be performed on these disk images.

According to an aspect of the invention, there is provided an application server disk image generating apparatus and method. The application server disk image generating apparatus comprises a basic disk image generating means for generating basic disk images for basic programs used by the server; an incremental disk image generating means for generating incremental disk images including heritage relationship for other respective applications based on the basic programs used by the server; and an image profile generating means for generating an image profile for each of the basic disk images and the incremental disk images, the image profile being used to describe requirements of hardware, software and configuration of provisioning the disk images, and describe the heritage relationship between the disk image and other disk images.

In the above disk image generating apparatus, an incremental disk image generating manner is adopted, i.e. only an incremental part of the disk image to be generated relative to the existing disk image is stored as an incremental disk image; while as for other same parts as the existing disk image, they are shared with the existing disk image and only a heritage relationship map is saved. Since there are a lot of common data blocks among child images, parent images and ancestor images, those data blocks will share the same storage blocks, thereby greatly decreasing storage consumption and improving storage efficiency. Therefore, for a commercial storage system, we could create and store a large number of application server disk images to construct a fast and on-demand application server provisioning service repository.

According to another aspect of the invention, there is provided an application server disk image managing and distributing system comprising a basic disk image generating means for generating basic disk images for basic programs used by the server; an incremental disk image generating means for generating incremental disk images including heritage relationship for other respective applications based on the basic programs used by the server; an image profile generating means for generating an image profile for each of the basic disk images and the incremental disk images; an image repository for storing the generated disk images and image profiles; and a distribution server for distributing disk images and a corresponding image profiles from the image repository to the client based on the receipt of a request to add or update the disk image from a client that already has said basic disk images, or actively according to pre-settings of a customer.

According to yet another aspect of the invention, there is provided a system for provisioning an application server using disk images comprising a basic disk image manager for storing basic disk imaged for basic programs and corresponding image profiles in a client image repository; an incremental disk image manager for receiving and processing a request to add or update a disk image from a customer; the client image repository for storing the disk images and the image profiles; a distribution agent for, under the control of the incremental disk image manager transferring the request to add or update the disk image from the customer to a disk image management and distribution system and receiving the requested disk images and image profiles provided by the disk image management and distribution system, as well as receiving the disk images and the image profiles actively sent by the disk image management and distribution system according to pre-settings of a customer; and a provisioning means for restoring the disk image to the application server of the customer for provisioning.

For an application server provisioning service provider, adopting the above disk image management and distribution system and provisioning system greatly reduces the time of deployment, simplifies the deployment process, reduces the time of engineer training and thereby decreases the cost; avoids human errors and provides a globally most advanced service version; and makes experience, skills and operations in the provisioning process become reusable assets and reduces the delay of transmitting solutions. For a customer requiring the provisioning service, he can share expert experience worldwide, because the contents of the basic disk images are determined by experts in the art and delivered to the customer's site via an optical disk and a network. Once the customer obtains the basic disk images, he can build up his own disk image repository for further on-demand provisioning. Alternatively, the customer may just restore it to the application sever and makes the application server available in a few minutes. And, if the customer wants an updated application, he may obtain an incremental image with a small size from the Internet. Therefore, this method can meet customers' provisioning requirements flexibly.

According to yet another aspect of the invention, there is provided an application server disk image generating method comprising generating basic disk images for basic programs used by the sever; generating incremental disk images including heritage relationship for other respective applications based on the basic programs used by the server; and generating an image profile for each disk image of the basic disk images and the incremental disk images.

According to yet another aspect of the invention, there is provided a method of acquiring a disk image from a disk image management and distribution center for provisioning an application server, comprising: generating basic disk images for basic programs used by the application sever, generating incremental disk images relative to existing disk images for other programs based on the basic programs, and generating an image profile for each of the disk images for describing heritage relationship between the disk image and other disk images, in the disk image management and distribution center, the image profile being also used to describe requirements of hardware, software and configuration of provisioning the disk image; storing the generated disk images and image profiles in an image repository; acquiring the basic disk images from the disk image management and distribution center and storing them in a client image repository by a client provisioning service center; receiving parameters required for provisioning the application server input by a customer and calling a distribution agent to send a provisioning request to a distribution server of the disk image management and distribution center by a client image manager; querying an image profile matching the received parameters in the image repository and distributing the matching image profile and a corresponding incremental disk image to the client by a distribution server; receiving the incremental disk image and the image profile and storing them in the client image repository by the distribution agent of the client; and performing the provisioning by restoring the corresponding disk image to the application server of the client by the client image manager according to provisioning requirements of the customer.

These and/or other aspects, features and advantages of the invention will become apparent and more readily understood from the following description of embodiments in conjunction with the attached drawings, in which:

FIG. 1 depicts a system providing application server image provisioning service according to an embodiment of the invention.

FIG. 2 is an example representing heritage relationship among respective disk images according to the embodiment of the invention.

FIG. 3 shows a block diagram of the structure of a distribution server in FIG. 1 according to the embodiment of the invention.